Ding Dong Death

Ding Dong Death Review

The neighbors are dead and still throwing parties. Nolimit City has put a clubhouse in a graveyard, drawn it as a black-and-white cartoon, and lit it with dashes of green neon that flare whenever something worth watching is about to happen. Look closely at the symbols, and the guest list is doing the talking. The mugshot with ACE tattooed across his forehead is Beefy Dick, the inmate who leads the breakout in San Quentin Manhunt, and he has turned up dead.

Underneath the cartoon is a six-reel grid where winning symbols clear and fresh ones drop into the gaps, and a meter that climbs every third time that happens. Fill it, and the residents start turning wild, one whole character at a time, until the grid is working for you rather than against you. That meter is the reason a paytable this small carries a 14,280x ceiling.

This is also a studio that shows its work. Eleven ways into the game carry their own price, from a nudge costing twice your stake to a thousand times stake purchase, and each states what it returns and how often it reaches the top prize. Read the first column, and the choice looks like it barely matters. Read the second, and it matters more than anything else on the page.

Six reels, three rows, and 729 ways, with wins paying from the leftmost reel rightwards across touching reels. Any winning symbols explode, and new ones fall into the gaps, which can pay again, and it keeps going until a drop produces nothing. Every third one of those drops unlocks a level on the Death Meter, which takes one character symbol and turns every one of them wild for the rest of the round.

Wild stands in for everything except the scatter. Land three or more scatters, and you move into the free spins, where the meter carries over rather than resetting, and where the multiplier it produces applies to the whole screen instead of a single win. The wilds are where the money hides, because a wild that helps make a win does not simply vanish.

How To Play

• Set your stake between 0.20 and 200, then spin. Wins pay left to right across touching reels.
• Winning symbols clear and new ones drop in. Every third drop lifts the Death Meter one level.
• Each meter level turns one character symbol wild for the rest of the round.
• Three, four or five scatters open 7, 9 or 11 Ding Dong Spins. Six scatters open 13 Ding Dong Death Spins.
• In the free spins the meter and the multiplier do not reset, and every extra scatter adds a spin.
• When a round ends you may be offered an extra spin at a price. The game states the best return comes from turning it down.

Bonus Features

• Death Meter. Five levels, running in the base game and the free spins. Every third drop unlocks one and turns a character symbol wild for the rest of the round. Reaching level five sets the screen multiplier to x2 the first time and adds one on every unlock after that, and it may also fire the Mental Patient feature, an xSplit Wild or an xNudge Wild. Whichever fires is spent on the spot, and level five then locks again so it can be refilled. That is the loop the round runs on. Every trip back to the top pays another point on the screen multiplier and puts another special wild on the table, so the meter is not a one time unlock but something you keep refilling, and the anticipation resets with it. The catch is where it sits. These are the last things the meter hands out, so they turn up late in a round if they turn up at all.
• Knock Knock. Three or more matching symbols in a horizontal line that do not form a win are removed, leaving Mental Patient symbols in the middle positions. Any multiplier sitting on a replaced position transfers across. Everything else on screen apart from scatters, wilds and Mental Patients explodes and a new drop follows.
• Ding Dong Spins. Seven, nine or eleven spins from three, four or five scatters. The meter and the screen multiplier carry in rather than resetting, and each scatter landed adds another spin.
• Ding Dong Death Spins. Thirteen spins from six scatters, with everything above still running. Here each unlocked meter level adds one to the screen multiplier, level five adds one rather than setting a value, and any xNudge multiplier that takes part in a win adds to the screen multiplier too.
• Extra Spin. Offered when a round ends, keeping the meter levels and multiplier you had, priced from those and only offered when the price is at or below what you have already won. Scatters cannot land on it.

Boosters, charged on every spin

• Bonus Booster, 2x stake. Turns one bonus in 282 spins into one in 93. Returns 96.08%, the same as base play. At 2x a spin that is about 186x staked per bonus against 282x unboosted, so it is the one booster that reaches rounds more cheaply than simply playing. Top prize odds are 1 in 1.6 million.
• Death Meter 3, 50x stake. Level three guaranteed. Returns 96.07%. Bonus frequency barely moves, 1 in 269 against 1 in 282, and the top prize sits at 1 in 664,450.
• Death Meter 4, 100x stake. Level four guaranteed. Returns 96.08%. Bonus frequency 1 in 172, top prize 1 in 88,070.
• Death Meter 5, 200x stake. Level five guaranteed, with the screen multiplier climbing from the second unlock onward. Returns 96.07%. Bonus frequency 1 in 148, and the top round becomes 1 in 2,800 against 1 in 50,200 unboosted, which is 18 times more likely. Top prize 1 in 9,020.
• xNudge Booster, 300x stake. A guaranteed xNudge Wild on reel three or four. Returns 96.03%, the lowest number in the game, but top prize odds of 1 in 5,020 make it one of the shorter roads to the ceiling.

Feature buys

• 7 Ding Dong Spins, 80x. Returns 96.10%, the best figure available anywhere in this game, and reaches the top prize once in 769,200 rounds, the longest odds of any route including not buying at all.
• 9 Ding Dong Spins, 200x. Returns 96.07%. Those two extra spins cost 60x each, and the top prize comes in at 1 in 111,100.
• 11 Ding Dong Spins, 500x. Returns 96.09%. Those two cost 150x each, and the top prize jumps to 1 in 2,010, which is where the menu starts to earn its money.
• 13 Ding Dong Death Spins, 1,000x. The top round, with the meter adding to the screen multiplier on every level. Returns 96.06%, the second lowest RTP on the menu, and reaches the 14,280x ceiling once in 501 rounds. That is the shortest road to the top prize in the game by a wide margin.
• Lucky Draw, 304x. A weighted draw across the four rounds at 30%, 40%, 20% and 10%. Returns 96.07% and reaches the top prize once in 3,200 rounds, which makes it the second most efficient route to the ceiling on the whole menu.

The returns match. The odds do not.

Put the two published columns side by side and the menu stops looking flat. Multiply what a round costs by how many of them it takes to reach the 14,280x ceiling, and you get the stake each route needs to get there once. Thirteen Death Spins at 1,000x reaches it once in 501 rounds, so about 501,000x staked. Seven Ding Dong Spins at 80x reaches it once in 769,200 rounds, so about 61.5 million. Same game, same return to within four hundredths of a point, and one route is 123 times cheaper at the thing everyone is actually chasing.

Ranked that way the order barely resembles the price list. The 1,000x round leads. Lucky Draw at 304x and the 500x round come next at around a million staked. Then the xNudge Booster, then Death Meter 5. The base game sits seventh at five million. Below it, worse than not buying anything at all, sit Death Meter 4, the 200x round, Death Meter 3 and finally the 80x round in last place.

That is what a flat RTP with a rising price actually buys. The same money comes back either way, but the cheap products return it in small pieces and the expensive ones concentrate it into something rare and enormous. It also explains the shape of the round. The collection needs spins to get going, and thirteen spins with the meter feeding the screen multiplier is simply a different machine to seven. Duck Hunters 2 prices its twelve products by what the rounds do. This one prices them by how far into the tail they reach.